Well, my tablet has finally stopped working, bringing Elements to a screeching halt and limiting me to the realms of traditional art and spriting.

I don't have any sketches at the moment, but I got an idea and ended up making all this:

I'm going for an NES look, although I may be using too many colors to be genuine.
Still working out the details on just what this is or is going to be, but even if I don't get something made I'll probably still use these characters somewhere. I like them.

Also:
Picasion doesn't have a setting where I can finetune the speed between "siezure speed" and "slow motion slideshow", so it looks pretty comical, but when I slowed them down to appropriate speed in GameMaker it looked fine.

Well, you're right, you're definitely not using the NES palette, but that doesn't mean you can't go for that style. My Secret Santa gift has an NES look to it, but I certainly didn't use the NES palette either.

The running animations are fairly stiff, I suggest you make a visit here, it helps a lot (running animations are a HUGE pet-peeve for a lot of senior pixel artists, because they're often really poorly done). My main issue is that the girl's hands travel really far upwards and downwards, but her legs don't show the same dramatic motion, plus her chest, stomach, and head don't move at all to match.

Olothontor wrote:Well, you're right, you're definitely not using the NES palette, but that doesn't mean you can't go for that style. My Secret Santa gift has an NES look to it, but I certainly didn't use the NES palette either.

The running animations are fairly stiff, I suggest you make a visit here, it helps a lot (running animations are a HUGE pet-peeve for a lot of senior pixel artists, because they're often really poorly done). My main issue is that the girl's hands travel really far upwards and downwards, but her legs don't show the same dramatic motion, plus her chest, stomach, and head don't move at all to match.

Beyond that, good job (sorry if this is a lot of critique)!

Eh, I thought so. I tried to find some tutorials on 8-bit spriting/8-bit palettes, but nothing really turned up. I like them better this way anyways.

On the subject of the animations, I was keeping it restricted to 3 frames to keep in the spirit of Megaman and the various other 8-bit references I used, as well as giving it an old NES-game style. I did try to make it more fluid though for the girl, since it's more noticable on her than on the robodude.
I'll probably tinker with it for a while. I moved the legs to a more extreme motion to go with the arms, like you suggested, and moving the torso is still being fidgeted with.
Critique in any quantity is fine by me, as long as it isn't repetitive or condescending.

Also the current edition:
Added some more animations for the girl (jumping, skidding), put more crap on the big ship, and made some animated tiles. Also changed the badguy's weapon to a rocket launcher, since those are cooler anyway.

To be worked on is an "on-world" version of the robodude's ship (the little tiny one near the big ship's landing strip, you can see the WIP big version on here too), a better weapon for robodude than a stupid generic lasergun, and more badguys.

Last edited by doodstormer on Wed Dec 01, 2010 2:42 pm, edited 1 time in total.

ikensall wrote:WoW thats awesome, but you really need to get a new tablet, for elements.

Yeah I'm looking to get it fixed/replaced asap, I hate not being able to continue that.

Olothontor wrote:The remainder of the animations LOOK fine, but I haven't yet seen them in action, so I can't honestly say (I have a really bad frame-by-frame eyeball).

Here's (I think) the rest of the animations:

I'm thinking the girl will skid when she runs. I haven't yet determined how the game will work or anything so I have no idea how rage-inducingly annoying that could turn out to be, so it may not last.

Climbing, nothing really elaborate but still a necessity. Needs a bit of tweaking.

Minor fix to robodude's running. I realized what looked so off about the running, I had mismatched the arms with the legs so they were moving in an unnatural way.

The baddies so far. The Lobber looks like he's throwing a fastball or something since I didn't animate the grenade (that'll vary depending on where it bounces off of anyway), but I think it'll look better when "in action".

A test of the animated tiles. They turned out pretty well.

There's a tank in the works, but I still need to tweak it before I decide whether it stays or goes.